A few weeks after last year’s Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm’s Bill Davidson talked with me about the importance of making energy efficiency a priority in wireless chip design.
Davidson, who is Qualcomm’s senior vice president of global marketing and investor relations, voiced frustration over some of the gigahertz-size claims that some companies coming out of the computer chip space were making about the speed of their wireless processors. “It would be like in an era of $4 a gallon gasoline not caring if the car only gets 5 miles per gallon,” Davidson said at the time. His point was that there’s nothing like a little mobile Web browsing to drain your smartphone battery—and the San Diego wireless giant really understands the critical importance of optimizing power use to extend battery life.
I immediately thought of that conversation when I noticed that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) has acquired Summit Microelectronics, a Sunnyvale, CA-based maker of power management chips used in mobile phones, tablets, and e-readers. In a statement this morning, Qualcomm says its “power management roadmap will be significantly enhanced with the addition of Summit’s expertise and products.”
Qualcomm’s statement also says: “The demand for more sophisticated battery management is critical in
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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